A Hybrid Simulation Model for Crowdsourced Software Development

Crowdsourcing as a new emerging software development method contains crowdsourced mini-tasks as demand and online workers as suppliers. The major counter-argument in such systems is that suppliers are volunteers and are not bound by any contract, also, the size of available suppliers varies wieldy throughout the day. Such uncertainty about the receiving service may cause inefficiency and task failure. This research presents a hybrid simulation model to address the risk of task failure in competitive crowdsourcing platforms. The simulation model is composed of three components: the discrete event simulation which represents the task life cycle, the agent-based simulation which illustrates the crowd workers' decision-making process and the systems dynamic simulation which displays the platform.